The Christmas They Called Me Unsettled

I want to tell you what that was like, to have a sixteen-year-old say out loud the thing that I had carried alone for nine months and never said to anyone. It was like the window in my old kitchen when the wind comes out of the northwest, that low note, that opening. Something I had sealed up came unsealed.

And then the man I have not told you about yet cleared his throat.

His name is Earl Vetter. He is a farmer, seventy-eight years old, and he was at that table because my mother, to her credit, does not like to think of anyone alone on Christmas, and Earl’s wife had passed in October, and he has no children, and so my mother had told him to come and he had come, and he had sat all through dinner saying almost nothing, a big slow man with hands like gloves full of walnuts.

His wife was Dorothy Vetter. I had nursed Dorothy for the last five months of her life, that fall, driving out to the Vetter place on the far side of the county three and four times a week, long after the hours I was being paid for had run out, because Dorothy liked me to read to her from the Psalms and because Earl did not know how to do any of it and was frightened to learn.

Earl cleared his throat, and he stood up. It took him a while to stand up. And when he was up he looked at my mother, and he said, “Loretta, I knew your husband forty years and I’m going to speak at your table and you’ll forgive me.”

My mother said, “Earl, of course, please,” in a flustered way, because you do not tell a grieving seventy-eight-year-old man to sit down.

“This woman here,” Earl said, and he pointed one of those big hands down the table at me, “this woman you just called going nowhere. My Dorothy died in September. You know that. What you don’t know is how she died, because you weren’t there and I don’t say that to be ugly, nobody was there, nobody comes out to our place, we’re too far out.”

He stopped and worked his jaw.

“My Dorothy died easy,” he said. “She died easy because of this woman. This woman came out to my house I don’t know how many times, three times a week, more, and she wasn’t getting paid for the half of it, I know that now, I found out after, the nurse company told me they’d only sent her for so many hours and she come anyway on her own time. She taught me how to give Dorothy her medicine so Dorothy wouldn’t have to go into a home away from me. She sat with my wife and read to her out of the Bible when I couldn’t, when I’d have to go out to the barn because I couldn’t stand to watch it. And the night Dorothy passed, this woman drove forty minutes on an icy road at two in the morning because I called her, not the doctor, not nobody else, I called her, and she come, and she sat with us, and she helped me say goodbye to my wife of fifty-one years.”